This is a picture of a company trying to sell your information to whoever. Do you trust Mark Zuckerman's or a faceless agent with this power? Why should you before knowing what follows?
All this is inevitable and it is creating a society in which it is becoming more and more difficult to hide. With face recognition almost upon us it will become impossible commit a crime in a fully surveiled environment.
I do see a booming market for privacy booths fitted with proper software that truly alienates your identity. No home should go without or business.
Mark Zuckerberg leveraged Facebook user data to fight rivals and help friends, leaked documents show
Facebook’s leaders seriously discussed selling access to user data — and privacy was an afterthought.
By Olivia Solon and Cyrus Farivar
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/mark-zuckerberg-leveraged-facebook-user-data-fight-rivals-help-friends-n994706?
Facebook
CEO Mark Zuckerberg oversaw plans to consolidate the social network’s
power and control competitors by treating its users’ data as a
bargaining chip, while publicly proclaiming to be protecting that data,
according to about 4,000 pages of leaked company documents largely
spanning 2011 to 2015 and obtained by NBC News.
The
documents, which include emails, webchats, presentations, spreadsheets
and meeting summaries, show how Zuckerberg, along with his board and
management team, found ways to tap Facebook’s trove of user data —
including information about friends, relationships and photos — as
leverage over companies it partnered with.
In
some cases, Facebook would reward favored companies by giving them
access to the data of its users. In other cases, it would deny user-data
access to rival companies or apps.
For
example, Facebook gave Amazon extended access to user data because it
was spending money on Facebook advertising and partnering with the
social network on the launch of its Fire smartphone. In another case,
Facebook discussed cutting off access to user data for a messaging app
that had grown too popular and was viewed as a competitor, according to
the documents.
All the while, Facebook was formulating a strategy to publicly frame these moves as a way of protecting user privacy.
Private communication between users is “increasingly important,” Zuckerberg said in a 2014 New York Times interview. “Anything we can do that makes people feel more comfortable is really good.”
But
the documents show that behind the scenes, in contrast with Facebook’s
public statements, the company came up with several ways to require
third-party applications to compensate Facebook for access to its users’
data, including direct payment, advertising spending and data-sharing
arrangements. While it’s not unusual for businesses that are working
together to share information about their customers, Facebook has access
to sensitive data that many other companies don’t possess.
Facebook
ultimately decided not to sell the data directly but rather to dole it
out to app developers who were considered personal “friends” of
Zuckerberg or who spent money on Facebook and shared their own valuable
data, the documents show.
Facebook denied that it gave
preferential treatment to developers or partners because of their ad
spending or relationship with executives. The company has not been
accused of breaking the law.
About 400 of the 4,000 pages of documents have previously been reported by other media outlets, and also by a member of the British Parliament who has been investigating
Facebook’s data privacy practices in the wake of the Cambridge
Analytica scandal. However, this cache represents the clearest and most
comprehensive picture of Facebook’s activities during a critical period
as the company struggled to adapt to the rise of smartphones following
its rocky debut as a public company.
The thousands of
newly shared documents were anonymously leaked to the British
investigative journalist Duncan Campbell, who shared them with a handful
of media organizations: NBC News, Computer Weekly and Süddeutsche
Zeitung. Campbell, a founding member of the International Consortium of
Investigative Journalists, is a computer forensics expert who has worked
on international investigations including on offshore banking and big
tobacco. The documents appear to be the same ones obtained by Parliament in late 2018 as part of an investigation into Facebook. Facebook did not question the authenticity of the documents NBC News obtained.
The documents stem from a California court case between the social network and the little-known startup Six4Three, which sued Facebook in 2015
after the company announced plans to cut off access to some types of
user data. Six4Three’s app, Pikinis, which soft-launched in 2013, relied
on that data to allow users to easily find photos of their friends in
bathing suits.
Facebook has acknowledged that it considered charging for access to user data.
But Facebook has challenged the significance of those discussions,
telling the Wall Street Journal last year and NBC News this month that
the company was merely mulling various business models.
Facebook has also repeatedly said that the documents had been “cherry-picked”
and were misleading. Facebook reiterated this stance when NBC News
contacted the social media company for comment on the newly leaked
documents.
“As we’ve said many times, Six4Three —
creators of the Pikinis app — cherry picked these documents from years
ago as part of a lawsuit to force Facebook to share information on
friends of the app's users,” Paul Grewal, vice president and deputy
general counsel at Facebook, said in a statement released by the
company.
“The set of documents, by design, tells only one
side of the story and omits important context. We still stand by the
platform changes we made in 2014/2015 to prevent people from sharing
their friends' information with developers like the creators of Pikinis.
The documents were selectively leaked as part of what the court found
was evidence of a crime or fraud to publish some, but not all, of the
internal discussions at Facebook at the time of our platform changes.
But the facts are clear: we've never sold people’s data.”
The finding of “evidence of a crime or fraud” came from a preliminary decision by the judge in the Six4Three case about an earlier round of leaked documents.
NBC
News has not been able to determine whether the documents represent a
complete picture.
Facebook declined to provide additional evidence to support the claim of cherry-picking.
Facebook declined to provide additional evidence to support the claim of cherry-picking.
Still, these freshly
leaked documents show that the plans to sell access to user data were
discussed for years and received support from Facebook’s most senior
executives, including Zuckerberg, chief operating officer Sheryl
Sandberg, chief product officer Chris Cox and VP of growth Javier
Olivan. Facebook declined to make them available for comment.🎉
After NBC News contacted Facebook for comment, Facebook’s lawyers wrote to the judge
in the Six4Three case, claiming that Six4Three had leaked the documents
to a “national broadcast network” and seeking to depose Six4Three’s
founders. NBC News received the documents from Campbell, who received
them from an anonymous source. Six4Three denied leaking the documents.
When
Facebook ultimately cut off broad access to user data in 2015, the move
contributed to the decline of thousands of competitors and small
businesses that relied on what Facebook had previously described as a “level-playing field”
in terms of access to data. In addition to Pikinis, the casualties
included Lulu, an app that let women rate the men they dated; an
identity fraud-detecting app called Beehive ID; and Swedish breast
cancer awareness app Rosa Bandet (Pink Ribbon).
The
strategy orchestrated by Zuckerberg had some of his employees comparing
the company to villains from Game of Thrones, while David Poll, a senior
engineer, called the treatment of outside app developers “sort of
unethical,” according to the documents. But Zuckerberg’s approach also
earned admiration: Doug Purdy, Facebook’s director of product, described
the CEO as a “master of leverage,” according to the documents.
Facebook declined to comment on these employee communications.
A PRIVACY MYTH
One
of the most striking threads to emerge from the documents is the way
that Facebook user data was horse-traded to squeeze money or shared data
from app developers.
In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal in early 2018 and rising awareness of the Six4Three case, Facebook has attempted to frame changes
it made to its platform in 2014 and 2015 as being driven by concerns
over user privacy. In statements to media organizations, Facebook has
said it locked down its platform to protect users from companies that
mishandled user data, such as Cambridge Analytica, as well as apps that
spammed users’ news feeds or were creepy, such as Six4Three’s
bikini-spotting app Pikinis.
However,
among the documents leaked, there’s very little evidence that privacy
was a major concern of Facebook’s, and the issue was rarely discussed in
the thousands of pages of emails and meeting summaries. Where privacy
is mentioned, it is often in the context of how Facebook can use it as a
public relations strategy to soften the blow of the sweeping changes to
developers’ access to user data. The documents include several examples
suggesting that these changes were designed to cement Facebook’s power
in the marketplace, not to protect users.
In Six4Three’s
case, for example, Facebook’s head of policy Allison Hendrix
acknowledged in a June 2017 deposition obtained by NBC News that the
social network never received any complaints about the Pikinis app, nor
did Facebook send Six4Three any policy or privacy violation notices.
Six4Three, Hendrix confirmed, was playing within the rules Facebook had
set for developers.
Despite this, Six4Three’s access to
data, specifically access to a user’s friends’ photos, was cut off in
April 2015 as part of sweeping changes to Facebook’s platform announced a
year earlier, which affected as many as 40,000 apps. Six4Three shut
down the app soon afterward.
“Our
case is about Zuckerberg’s decision to weaponize the reliance of
companies on his purportedly neutral platform and to weaponize the
private and sensitive data of billions of people,” said Six4Three
founder Ted Kramer.
A TURNING POINT FOR FACEBOOK
Facebook
recognized early on that working with third-party app developers could
help make the social network more interesting and drive the platform’s
expansion. Beginning in early 2010, Facebook created tools that allowed
the makers of games (remember Farmville?) and other apps to connect with
its audience in return for ensuring those users spent more time on
Facebook.
Facebook achieved this through its “Graph API”
(Application Programming Interface), a common means to allow software
programs to interact with each other. In Facebook’s case, this meant
that third-party apps such as games could post updates on people’s
profiles, which would be seen by players’ friends and potentially
encourage them to play, too. Beyond that, it allowed the makers of those
games to access a slew of data from Facebook users, including their
connections to friends, likes, locations, updates, photos and more.
The
Graph API — and particularly the way it let third parties promote their
products to and extract data from a user’s social connections — was a
key feature of Facebook that Six4Three and thousands of other companies
relied upon for viral marketing and user growth.
However,
after a few years, Facebook decided the app developers were getting
more value from the user data they extracted from Facebook than Facebook
was getting out of the app developers, the documents show.
After Facebook went public in May 2012, its stock price plummeted, which Zuckerberg later characterized as “disappointing.”
The company was in a desperate position, documents show, with users
sharing fewer photos and posts on the platform as they spent more time
on their cellphones. An internal Facebook presentation looking back at
this period used the phrase “terminal decline” to describe the fall in
engagement.
Facebook executives, including Zuckerberg and
Sandberg, spent months brainstorming ways to turn the company around.
An idea that they kept returning to: make money from the app partners,
by charging them for access to Facebook’s users and their data.
‘SELL DATA FOR $”
Several
proposals for charging developers for access to Facebook’s platform and
data were put forward in a presentation to the company’s board of
directors, according to emails and draft slides from late August 2012.
Among
the suggestions: a fixed annual fee for developers for reviewing their
apps; an access fee for apps that requested user data; and a charge for
“premium” access to data, such as a user trust score or a ranking of the
strongest relationships between users and their friends.
“Today
the fundamental trade is ‘data for distribution’ whereas we want to
change it to either ‘data for $’ and/or ‘$ for distribution,’” Chris
Daniels, a Facebook business development director, wrote in an August
2012 email to other top leaders in the company discussing the upcoming
presentation.
Discussions continued through October, when
Zuckerberg explained to close friend Sam Lessin the importance of
controlling third-party apps’ ability to access Facebook’s data and
reach people’s friends on the platform. Without that leverage, “I don’t
think we have any way to get developers to pay us at all,” Zuckerberg
wrote in an email to Lessin.
In the same week, Zuckerberg
floated the idea of pursuing 100 deals with developers “as a path to
figuring out the real market value” of Facebook user data and then
“setting a public rate” for developers.
“The goal here
wouldn’t be the deals themselves, but that through the process of
negotiating with them we’d learn what developers would actually pay
(which might be different from what they’d say if we just asked them
about the value), and then we’d be better informed on our path to set a
public rate,” Zuckerberg wrote in a chat.
Facebook told
NBC News that it was exploring ways to build a sustainable business, but
ultimately decided not to go forward with these plans.
"I just can’t think of any instances where that data has leaked from developer to developer and caused a real issue for us.”
Zuckerberg was unfazed by the potential privacy risks associated with Facebook’s data-sharing arrangements.
“I’m
generally skeptical that there is as much data leak strategic risk as
you think,” he wrote in the email to Lessin. “I think we leak info to
developers but I just can’t think of any instances where that data has
leaked from developer to developer and caused a real issue for us.”
Facebook told NBC News that this was an example of a cherry-picked email designed to bolster Six4Three’s case.
Zuckerberg
didn’t know it at the time, but a privacy bug affecting an unnamed
third-party app would create precisely this kind of strategic risk the
following year, according to a panicked chatlog between Michael Vernal,
who was director of engineering, and other senior employees.
It’s
not clear exactly what happened or which app was involved, but it
appears that Zuckerberg’s private communications could have leaked from
Facebook to the external app in an unexpected way.
Vernal
said that it “could have been near-fatal for Facebook platform” if
“Mark had accidentally disclosed earnings ahead of time because a
platform app violated his privacy.”
“Holy crap,” replied Avichal Garg, then director of product management.
“DO
NOT REPEAT THIS STORY OFF OF THIS THREAD,” added Vernal. “I can’t tell
you how terrible this would have been for all of us had this not been
caught quickly.”
Vernal and Garg did not respond to requests for comment.
‘GOOD FOR THE WORLD’ BUT NOT ‘GOOD FOR US’
In
late November 2012, Zuckerberg sent a long email to Facebook’s senior
leadership team saying that Facebook shouldn’t charge developers for
access to basic data feeds. However, he said that access to Facebook
data should be contingent on the developers sharing all of the “social
content” generated by their apps back to Facebook, something Zuckerberg
calls “full reciprocity.”
The existing arrangement, where
developers weren’t required to share their data back with Facebook,
might be “good for the world” but it’s not “good for us,” Zuckerberg
wrote in the email.
He noted that though Facebook could
charge developers to access user data, the company stood to benefit more
from requiring developers to compensate Facebook in kind — with their
own data — and by pushing those developers to pay for advertising on
Facebook’s platform.
The endgame: to ensure Facebook maintained its dominant position in the market.
“The
purpose of the platform is to tie the universe of all the social apps
together so we can enable a lot more sharing and still remain the
central social hub,” Zuckerberg said in the email.
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